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Month: January 2009

I don’t think I’ve ever been tagged before, even though I know I’ve filled out a jillion of these kinds of things in my LiveJournal just for the heck of it. But, Becca Mock tagged me so here goes the 8 things tag!

8 Favorite TV Shows
Man, I really used to not watch TV all that much and I’d have had a hard time coming up with 8 TV shows that I was even interested in. Unfortunately, getting married has increased my TV watching pretty exponentially and now I have to limit myself to 8 😛
1. Mythbusters
2. The Office
3. 30 Rock
4. Big Bang Theory (seriously, anyone who is a nerd or is married to a nerd, or is friends with nerds will get a kick out of this show. I highly recommend it!)
5. NCIS
6. House
7. The Colbert Report
8. How I Met Your Mother

8 Things That Happened Yesterday
1. Got all of the dishes done!! (I could have gone back to bed at that point and felt like I’d had a productive day.. is that sad or what?)
2. Cried over the ending of Little Women – apparently the combination of pregnancy hormones and the movie version of one of my very favorite books wasn’t so good 😛
3. Helped Amber and Crystal plan a baby shower for me – thanks again so much you guys!!
4. Finally got to meet Eric’s best friend Levi!
5. Played some Raving Rabbids 3
6. Went to Zupas with Eric for dinner – this is definitely one of our new favorite restaurants
7. Watched Sahara with Eric, even though we’d seen it before
8. Went to bed earlier than usual – which may not sound that exciting… but to a pregnant woman who isn’t sleeping well… it was heavenly!

8 Things I Look Forward To
1. Samuel being born!
2. Eric graduating
3. Finding out what exactly we’re going to do once Eric graduates – still no word from Omniture about the Taiwan position. Luckily Eric can just go full time doing what he’s doing now, but it’s not really what he wants to do long term, and we don’t really want to be in Utah once he finishes school. He’s planning on putting in his resume with some other companies just to see what’s out there. It’d just be nice to know where we’re going to be a few months from now 😛
4. Taylor’s wedding!!
5. Finishing up the big project I’m working on at work
6. Not having to commute down to Salt Lake anymore! Friday was my last day in the office, and now I’m on sorta maternity leave? I’m still working full time, but full time from my couch, which means that I’ll actually have some time to work on organizing our apartment to prepare for our baby to come. I’m so grateful that I work in a field where working from home is an option!
7. Eric working normal hours – I know this is sort of a combination of graduating and finding out what’s coming next, but I can’t wait for him to be working non-night shift hours so that I can actually see him during the evenings and we can plan to do things with other couples. Ever since we started dating he’s worked really strange hours, except for a couple of months while he was training at Omniture, but he was working on a huge school project at that time anyways so I still didn’t really get to see him in the evenings. We’ve had 4pm – 4am shifts while we were engaged, 4am – 4pm shifts when we were first married, and now 5pm – 10:30pm (and starting at 3pm on Sundays) Sunday – Thursday. Somehow we just can’t get away from those weird shifts! Working at the Network Operations Center for the Church meant weird hours and Sunday shifts (if the Church’s systems went down on Sunday that would definitely be mayhem, and probably the most likely time for them to go down. It is kinda weird though that working for the Church means mandatory working on Sundays 😛 ), and now that Eric’s job is basically to do technical support for China… which is not on the same time zone as we are – hence the workweek starting at 3pm on Sunday. I’m not trying to complain, I think we’ve been able to handle it pretty well, but I will definitely be grateful when he has a job that doesn’t require late nights and Sundays – even if that means moving to Taiwan to be on the same time zone as the job he wants.
8. Did I mention that I’m pretty excited for Samuel to be born?? Not only am I excited to be a mom, but I’m excited to have my body back to myself and give up some of the pregnancy symptoms – heartburn, not sleeping well, being kicked so much that I feel like my guts are going to be bruised, generally being a whale 🙂 I really don’t have much to complain about with this pregnancy but I’m not going to be sad when the baby is out either 😉

8 Things I Love about Winter
Hmm.. this is a difficult question since winter is generally not my favorite season…
1. Watching snow fall – it really just makes me happy inside to watch the snow fall, especially for the first time in the winter, and especially if I don’t have to drive in it and I know that Eric doesn’t have to ride his scooter in it
2. Wearing sweaters
3. Christmas! I love getting to spend time with family around the holidays
4. Having a good excuse to drink hot chocolate 🙂
5. Cuddling with Eric 🙂
6. Eric getting to go skiing – not a big fan of skiing myself, but Eric really enjoys it and I like seeing him happy.
7. I like that it’s the season that Eric and I started dating and got engaged in, lots of good memories around this time of year.
8. Is it bad for me to say that I love when it’s over? It’s not even so much that I hate winter so much as it really is exciting to see it turn into spring. It’s not as exciting in California to watch the seasons change because it’s pretty similar from one season to the next. It’s so much fun having spring after having had winter.

8 Things on my Wish list
Wow, this question was actually really helpful for me figuring out what there is left that we really need before Samuel comes! I’ve been trying to put together registries and comparing different products and stuff, but it was good to see what things I really do want to have before he comes.
1. A rocking chair
2. Sheets for the crib
3. Diapers and wipes (not real exciting… but probably the one thing that we really *need* before Samuel comes)
4. A diaper bag
5. A Diaper Genie (yay for a trash can that masks smelly diapers!)
6. A Pack ‘n Play
7. A new dresser so we have somewhere for all of the cute clothes we have for Samuel! – I really need to make it to Ikea so I can use this gift card that we got for our wedding.
8. A baby swing

I tag: anyone who feels like doing this. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to do it, but they are kinda fun to do just for yourself in my opinion.

Thanks for tagging me Becca! I really enjoyed doing this a lot more than I’d expected.

I know it is pretty trite to make a post of New Year’s Resolutions, but so be it. For several years New Year’s has actually been my favorite holiday, which may sound strange to a lot of people. I love Christmas and all the family and joy surrounding it, but it’s a holiday that is a little bit bloated with traditions and presents and stuff. I wouldn’t want to take away any of the things that we do surrounding Christmas because I love all of those traditions. However, I love that New Year’s doesn’t have any of that. Usually it’s just a quiet day with nothing in particular that you’re expected to do. I like using that day to reflect on the past year and the things I’d done to make myself better, or ways in which I had fallen short and renew my commitments to be a better person. There’s still the lingering spirit of Christmas and time spent with family, but there’s no pressure to do anything.

This year of course I didn’t really use the day to make my resolutions but spent the day with my husband just relaxing. It was a much needed break so I don’t feel bad about putting together my resolutions a few days later.

I’ve heard the argument that New Year’s Resolutions are silly because there’s not really something magical about the New Year that makes it good for making changes. On December 31st the clock changes from 11:59pm to 12:00am the same as it does on any other day. This is true and I fully agree that we shouldn’t need to wait for the New Year to make changes. It would be better to evaluate ourselves every single day and constantly be striving to improve. However, I like it as a milestone where I have an excuse to reflect on the path my life is taking me on and if it’s the path I’d like to be on. Ideally I try to check in with myself each week and set weekly goals and see how I’m doing on my yearly goals, but I’m not always perfect on that. At least once a year though I know that I’ve evaluated the direction of my life and that’s a good feeling.

Brittny’s Resolutions for 2009

I will learn to balance motherhood, being a wife and working. This is probably my biggest goal for this coming year. It’s not easily quantifiable like a lot of my other goals but it’s definitely the most challenging. Being a mother is going to be a whole new adventure that I’ve never encountered before but I’m excited for it. Less than 2 months remain before our little Samuel is here and I know that my life will never be the same again. I’m not sure how it will go trying to be a supportive wife, mother a baby, keep house, and work from home. Luckily, I know what my priorities are and I’ve accepted that some things that were once priorities may have to slide. We’ll see how this goes.

I will make it to the temple once a month. Once upon a time I was making it to the temple every week, but having a full time job and being a housewife have seemingly put a damper on that. Plus, since Eric and I work opposite schedules it has become very difficult for us to even coordinate a time to go. So, the lofty goal of weekly attendance will have to take a backseat to the more realistic goal of monthly attendance for the time being.

I will complete my visiting teaching monthly. This should be a given, but I’m not always as good at this as I would like to be. It’s always easier to make sure this is getting done when I have a specific resolution to do it as well as the commitment that I’ve always had in my heart.

I will feed our family more nutritious meals. I need to work on adding more fruits and vegetables into our diets and less processed foods. Hopefully this will get easier as I won’t be commuting to Salt Lake starting in a couple of weeks and I’ll have more time available to me to cook decent meals for us.

I will exercise at least twice a week. I know that the recommendation is for at least three times per week (and really for every day of the week). However, considering my current workout schedule (read: hardly ever) I don’t want to overwhelm myself with a goal that I’ll never be able to achieve and use that as an excuse to give up. I know that I’m not going to lose all of the baby weight immediately, but I’d like to work my way down to a healthy weight by the end of the year.

I will do better with my daily scripture study. I really love reading the scriptures, but for some reason it always takes a lot of effort to start reading them. I think partly because I have a Pavlovian response to reading the scriptures – they make me sleepy. See, my family always read scriptures as the last thing before going to bed at night, so my body associates scripture reading with bedtime and I automatically start yawning as soon as I open them, regardless of the time of day. I would really like to try and break that reaction and start reading at the beginning of the day when I’m more alert. But if nothing else I’d like to at least do better about making it a more consistent part of my daily routine.

I will do better about having personal morning and evening prayer as well as praying with my husband each night. I think this has been a resolution of mine every year since I started making resolutions (well, except for the praying with my husband part). It’s still not something I’m super great at so it will continue to be a goal until I am (which probably means until I die).

I will memorize 10 scriptures. I still need to decide what these 10 scriptures will be, but I know that as I have more scriptures memorized it helps me to remember the things that are important. I haven’t really memorized new scriptures since seminary but I think it will be more fun to memorize ones that I choose rather than just the ones given to me on a list.

I will add 5 new meals to our family’s repertoire of meal plans. I have a relatively limited number of meals that I can make well and we end up eating those over and over again. I’d like to find some new recipes that I can master over the course of this next year that are healthy and relatively simple. This goal is two-fold in that I want to improve my cooking skills, and add variety to our weekly meal plans. (any recipe suggestions would be more than welcome 🙂

I will read 5 novels. Once upon a time this was not a goal for me at all but more of a monthly occurrence. However, I no longer find time to read books that I enjoy like I once did. This is a goal that goes along with my goal of balancing things. It’s something that I should do for myself, not necessarily for any great personal improvement.

I’m sure there are other goals that I ought to set for myself, however it’s probably best if I limit myself to 10 or I will be too overwhelmed by the volume of my goals to complete any of them. I’ll try to check in periodically throughout the course of the year and see how I’m doing on each of these goals. Here’s to a bright new year full of possibilities!

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